ReHacked vol. 266: Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail, Britain's Secret Ice "Bergship" Aircraft Carrier Project and more

ESA - Webb captures iconic Horsehead Nebula in unprecedented detail #space #science

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show a part of the iconic nebula in a whole new light, capturing its complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution.

Make a donation - support Ukraine. My favourite: Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine. More options if you want alternatives. Also, very important Come Back Alive Foundation - Charity Organization.

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Dick Rutan: Man who set aviation milestone flying nonstop around the world dead at 85 | The Independent #promemoria

Burt Rutan was alarmed to see the plane he had designed was so loaded with fuel that the wing tips started dragging along the ground as it taxied down the runway. He grabbed the radio to warn the pilot, his older brother Dick Rutan. But Dick never heard the message.

Nine days and three minutes later, Dick, along with copilot Jeana Yeager, completed one of the greatest milestones in aviation history: the first round-the-world flight with no stops or refueling.

A decorated Vietnam War pilot, Dick Rutan died Friday evening at a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, with Burt and other loved ones by his side. He was 85. His friend Bill Whittle said he died on his own terms when he decided against enduring a second night on oxygen after suffering a severe lung infection.

World's 1st 'tooth regrowth medicine' to be tested in Japan from Sept. 2024 - The Mainichi #health

Clinical trials of the world's first "tooth regrowth medicine" are set to commence in September at Kyoto University Hospital, researchers announced here on May 2.

Once the medicine's safety is confirmed, it will be given to patients congenitally lacking a full set of teeth to confirm its effectiveness. The researchers hope to commence sale of the medicine in 2030.

Open Source Security (OpenSSF) and OpenJS Foundations Issue Alert for Social Engineering Takeovers of Open Source Projects – Open Source Security Foundation #security #software

Failed Credible Takeover Attempt

The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics. The email author(s) wanted OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. This approach bears strong resemblance to the manner in which “Jia Tan” positioned themselves in the XZ/liblzma backdoor.

Thumb Nation: How We Learned to Play With Our Fingers – The History of How We Play #computers #history #games #longread

If you want to see how much technology has changed, you need look no closer than the user experience. Once upon a time, we’d have to sit at a desk to access digital technology, now we access it on the go with mobile devices. However, it’s easy to identify who was an early user of mobile phones versus new users mostly by the way they type with the keyboard: Newer users type with their thumbs.

Manahel al-Otaibi: Saudi women's rights activist jailed for 11 years #humanrights #society

Two human rights groups have condemned an 11-year prison sentence handed to a Saudi fitness instructor and women's rights activist by a terrorism court.

Manahel al-Otaibi, 29, was convicted of charges related to her clothing choices and expression of her views online, Amnesty International and ALQST said.

These included calls for an end to the guardianship system and videos of her shopping without an abaya, they added.

Wounded orangutan seen using plant as medicine #nature

A Sumatran orangutan in Indonesia has self-medicated using a paste made from plants to heal a large wound on his cheek, say scientists.

It is the first time a creature in the wild has been recorded treating an injury with a medicinal plant.

After researchers saw Rakus applying the plant poultice to his face, the wound closed up and healed in a month.

Scientists say the behaviour could come from a common ancestor shared by humans and great apes.

A recent security incident involving Dropbox Sign - Dropbox Sign - Dropbox #security

Teranoptia - Tunera Type Foundry #design #art

Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard.

Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died | The Seattle Times #crime #aviation

Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.

Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.

He died after two weeks in critical condition, his aunt Carol Parsons said.

Answering Every Question You Have About IMEI Numbers #communications #history #longread #imei

1987 - The year the GSM Association was founded. The organization, the world’s largest representing the mobile industry, was actually built at the behest of a handful of European nations to help encourage careful development and uptake of mobile technology. (For the most part, it worked.) Today, it is responsible for administering Type Allocation Codes (TACs), an identifier for mobile devices that makes up more than half of modern IMEI codes. Today, GSMA serves as a trade or political lobbying group, and runs Mobile World Congress, one of the largest tech events in the world. (CTIA is the organization’s American counterpart.)

🇪🇺 Dear Europe, please wake up – eu/acc | Andreas Klinger #economy #career #longread

Eastern Europeans work harder than Americans. Even Italians work more hours than Americans.

Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink | Ars Technica #economy #internet

Facing competition from Starlink and other emerging satellite broadband networks, the two companies that own most of the traditional commercial communications spacecraft in geostationary orbit announced plans to join forces Tuesday.

SES, based in Luxembourg, will buy Intelsat for $3.1 billion. The acquisition will create a combined company boasting a fleet of some 100 multi-ton satellites in geostationary orbit, a ring of spacecraft located more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. This will be more than twice the size of the fleet of the next-largest commercial geostationary satellite operator.

The BASIC programming language turns 60 | Ars Technica #computers #history #software

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

New findings point to an Earth-like environment on ancient Mars #space #nature #science

A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake. The results were published today in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

“It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn’t expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit,” said Patrick Gasda, of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Space Science and Applications group and lead author on the study. “On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions.

Tesla Semi trucks in short supply for PepsiCo as its rivals use competing EV big rigs | Reuters

and

Tesla conducting more layoffs, including entire Supercharger team | Electrek #economy #automotive

Just after laying off “more than 10%” of its global workforce, Tesla is laying off even more employees – including senior executives and long-time veterans of the company, most notably the entire Supercharging team and the executive responsible for negotiating NACS adoption across the industry.

The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe #espionage #crime #longread

GRU Unit 29155, Russia’s assassination and sabotage squad, blew up ammunition warehouses in Czechia. It had help from Elena and Nikolai Šapošnikov, a family of deep-cover spies working as arms dealers.

Villa Elena, a three-storey hotel in Frama, Halkidiki, northern Greece, boasts a large outdoor swimming pool, gazebo, private garden, not to mention sprawling grounds. Even if the interior – all loud greens and purples with gold-rimmed cabinets – looks hopelessly post-Soviet, the amenities include foam pillows, hairdryers and bathrobes. One could do worse for $155 a night. But Nikolay and Elena Šapošnikov, for whom the pillared pile on the Aegean is named, are no ordinary hoteliers. They are Russian “illegals,” or spies operating outside of diplomatic cover, who spent decades living under false pretenses as naturalized citizens of Czechia.

Project Habbakuk: Britain's Secret Ice "Bergship" Aircraft Carrier Project - 99% Invisible #engineering #history

In the early 1940s, German submarines (U-Boats) were wreaking havoc on Allied forces in the Atlantic Ocean, sinking ships, and threatening to turn the tide of the war. What the Allies of WWII needed was something literally too big to fail. And one inventor working for the British Combined Operations Headquarters (a department of the War Office) had an idea: a giant, floating, mobile and unsinkable island made of ice.

The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself #copyrights

What is "Hachette v. Internet Archive"? 

Here's the short-short version of this lawsuit:

The Internet Archive created a program they called "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL) -- where a physical book is scanned, turned into a digital file, and that digital file is then "loaned" out to people on the Internet.  In 2020, The Internet Archive removed what few restrictions existed with this Digital Lending program, allowing an unlimited number of people to download the digital copy of a book.

The result was a group of publishers filing the "Hachette v. Internet Archive" lawsuit.  That lawsuit focused on two key complaints:

1. The books were "digitized" (converted from physical to digital form) -- and distributed -- without the permission of the copyright holders (publishers, authors, etc.).
2. The Internet Archive received monetary donations (and other monetary rewards) as a result of freely distributing said copyrighted material.  Again, without permission of the copyright holders.  Effectively making the Internet Archive's CDL a commercial enterprise for the distribution of what is best described as "pirated material".

That lawsuit was decided, against The Internet Archive, in 2023 -- with the judge declaring that "no case or legal principle supports" their defense of "Fair Use".

That judgment was appealed by The Internet Archive.  Which brings us to today, and thier final defense (in theory).

Atomic Nucleus Excited with Laser: A Breakthrough after Decades | TU Wien #science

Since the 1970s, there has been speculation that there might be a special atomic nucleus which, unlike other nuclei, could perhaps be manipulated with a laser, namely thorium-229. This nucleus has two very closely adjacent energy states – so closely adjacent that a laser should in principle be sufficient to change the state of the atomic nucleus.

For a long time, however, there was only indirect evidence of the existence of this transition. "The problem is that you have to know the energy of the transition extremely precisely in order to be able to induce the transition with a laser beam," says Thorsten Schumm. "Knowing the energy of this transition to within one electron volt is of little use, if you have to hit the right energy with a precision of one millionth of an electron volt in order to detect the transition.” It is like looking for a needle in a haystack – or trying to find a small treasure chest buried on a kilometer-long island.

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